The Cost of Downtime

In the banking and financial industry, systems must be available almost every second. Systems downtime will cost a bank plenty in lost revenues and damaged reputation.

According to Gartner Research, the cost of downtime are:

Productivity Loss
Revenue Loss
Damaged Reputation
Impaired Financial Performance
Other Expenses

The solution is to implement a high availability IT infrastructure. The whitepaper "Guideline to Design a Highly Available Infrastructure" by Manoj Madhavan of Wipro Technologies suggests the following process:

Process	About
Business Requirements Identification	Impact on outage and dependency on systems
Availability Requirements Identification	Service levels and outage recovery time
Architecture Design	Redundancy and identify points of failure
Component Identification	Products and tentative costs
Bill of Material Creation	Detailed product components and actual cost of products

Related Websites

Links to other information technology banking resources.

Information Technology for Banks

Banking Technology - Resource for Banks and Financial Institutions
Online resource on information technology solutions for banks and financial companies. Buyer's guide to banking applications, crm, risk management systems and more.